You'd have to be an incredibly slow typist before that became an issue. Personally, I rarely if ever bother to go particularly fast when it comes to typing because I don't need to. Right now I'm typing at a pretty relaxed pace so that I can read and correct as I go. It is nice that I don't have to think a lot about it, but if I did then I wouldn't have to go so slow. Reason being that I'd be paying more attention to what key I actually pressed rather than reading along to make sure that I pressed the correct keys at the correct times.
Or in other words, reducing cognitive load only works if you actually reduce the load. Shifting it from locating a key to checking that you typed what you meant to is at best a zero sum transaction.
30 WPM is easily doable without knowing how to touch type. Back before I bothered to learn to touch type, I could easily do that with the old hunt and peck.
And really, if you can't do at least 50 WPM, you really shouldn't be bragging about your typing speed, at least not anywhere that anybody that uses a keyboard on a regular basis might see you doing so.
That's what I was thinking about. Most of what you want in a programmer isn't measured by WPM. You could type a hundred WPM and still be completely useless if what you're typing is junk. Admittedly, I don't do a lot of programming, but much of my time spent programming is designing and contemplating how to solve the problem correctly.
Correctly as in securely, efficiently and in a way which I can read later on. Fast typing is from my point of view somewhat counter productive as short burst of flurry don't really make that much difference when you're trying to write quality code.
But then again, I used to be able to hunt and peck at 30+ WPM when I don't need to touch type.
Indeed, you can keep selling a product without support or patches for future OS releases, but in practice few people are willing to pay for that.
Probably the best case scenario would be how Blender was handled. It's not generally that useful to sell old software that's not being updated or bug fixed.
Except it won't. The only reason why they use chip and pin over there is that regulators actually regulate. In the US we haven't been using chip and pin because the bankers figured out that it's cheaper to just pay off any claims due to fraud than to pay the $50 or so it costs per card to use chip and pin.
It's probably not as big an issue in the UK and Europe in general given that they seem to be at least halfway serious about holding financial institutions responsible when they lose customer data. Around here the best you can hope for is a minor slap on the wrist.
I'm not particularly familiar with how he was planning to go about this, but it's a pretty good bet that a lot of the trouble came from subsidies. For reasons that don't make any sense to anybody outside the oil industry, oil gets heavily subsidized while renewable energy gets only a very small fraction of the government support.
It depends where you are, here in WA state, we have a high gas tax which helps to level things a bit, but given the amount of experience that we have with oil and related technologies, it's hard to get the scale necessary to compete with oil.
Alternative energy would probably be coming along a lot more quickly, if oil wasn't subsidized and oil companies were required to pay the full cost of the externalities that their product creates.
It's fairly typical for them to get less than 35 cents per copy, assuming that they're a big star, and more likely they'll get less than a quarter a copy, after the recording studio makes them double pay for production costs and hides the profits. Not to mention making the artists pay for breakage and other costs that should be the studios to pay.
I wouldn't be griping about the cost of albums so much if there was a meaningful amount of the overage going to pay the talent. But a significant amount of the money is going to marketing, fixing the incompetent vocals and over compressing the music.
Why? There is at least a couple alternatives, the local municipality or you could own it. And whomever the service provider is could be required to maintain it as a part of the service agreement. I suppose it could even be a third party that you contract to maintain that bit of infrastructure.
Just because we've made a system where the utility owns the last mile, does not mean that there aren't other ways of doing it. Some which may work better and others which work worse, but which have a different set of tradeoffs to consider.
A genuine free markets can't exist for very long. That was established a really long time ago that a free market ends in a single source provider over every thing, assuming that there isn't a revolution and that the government doesn't step in to stop it from happening.
Show me a free market in which that isn't the case and I'll show you a free market that isn't anywhere near mature.
Not true. Deregulation as the term is defined, means that the government gets out of the way and lets what will happen happen. Customers do not regulate a market, never have and never will, they just don't buy and refuse to buy in lock step.
On top of that if none of the providers are willing to offer what the customers want, it won't happen. In a regulated economy, what tends to happen is the government steps in and provides it at tax payer expense.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong. What you're describing is a well regulated market. Definitely not a free market. Adam Smith was quite clear that a free market will lead to the sorts of behaviors that the GP was complaining about unless somebody steps in and puts in place regulations which prevent it.
Greenpeace is not a business and to be a member of Greenpeace one must donate to the cause.
True, but you get to choose how much you donate and for practical purposes if you're not willing to put even a couple bucks in the hat, you're probably not interested in being a member in the first place.
Perhaps they shouldn't be making big budget games without making them worth the cost. I know that's a bit simplistic, but if you make a game that you have to sell for $60 a copy in order to break even, then you damn well better make sure that it's bug free or at least free of significant bugs. It's more than a little bit insulting to be charged that much and end up with massive bugs and gameplay which is at best half baked.
Spend the money on gameplay and making the game fun, then the graphics necessary to make it work. Blowing many millions of dollars on graphics and marketing without worrying about gameplay issues is a great way to ensure that you're not going to be making any money. Back when most Nintendo game news seemed to come out of Nintendo power, I'm sure that worked fine, but now that you can get reviews of a game within hours of release, that kind of astroturfing doesn't work very well.
$10 for a CD is overpaying by quite a bit. They fought tooth and nail to keep the price artificially inflated at $18 per disc for so long, eventually Steve Jobs and piracy was able to convince them to lower the price, but even at $10 a disc, you're still over paying. A lot of the extra money goes to the process of creating popularity and over processing performers that ought not be allowed anywhere near a microphone.
Movies tend to be different as it's hard to know what they ought to cost.
however for software, the model is radically different. once you're into "self-funding", the next version, once completed, is almost pure profit thanks to the internet. there's no "physical goods" to produce. if it's data, it can be hosted, and it can be distributed for virtually nothing.
That's not true. Unless your second product is something that sells indefinitely and results in you no longer having to develop new versions, that money ends up going to developing future versions and new product lines.
That's just a variant of the slippery slope fallacy. At some point the price of a game will reach a point where it's considered to be a good deal. And that point is for most people way below $60. Sure if you're young or have few responsibilities paying that much and getting a really long game might be worthwhile, but for most people that's a lot of money to pay for a game that you're likely only going to play for at most a few dozen hours.
Hollywood can sort of get away with that because it does cost a lot of money to make a quality film in most cases, and trying to cut corners does hurt the experience. But with games it's different a game which costs $1m to make doesn't necessarily end up being more fun than a game which only cost $10k to make.
I suspect that the price will hit a stable equilibrium somewhat over $10 a copy, or at least that's my suspicion. It's cheap enough that most people pay more than that for a decent meal at a restaurant, but with more actual time to enjoy it. It wouldn't be much of a shock to me if the equilibrium point ended up sticking around $20 or so.
I always wonder about that, considering that Canadians pay for the use, shouldn't they be allowed to put whatever copyright materials they like on it? I mean they have paid for it, at least from the major studios.
Dumb ass. You do realize that there's a lead time of a couple years before the results of policy changes take effect, right? There are exceptions from time to time, but as a general rule, the decisions made right after inauguration tend not to have much impact until about the time of midterm elections.
If you did your homework, you'd realize that President Bush got a full year before anybody criticized him and nearly 5 before the press started to do so.
Precisely why should they? In the US our politicians have been more than willing in the past to bend over backwards to ensure that they don't have to get a business plan in place which might work. And companies don't really go out of business any more, they end up being bought out by the competition and the morons that led to ruin end up getting golden parachutes as the workers get pink slips.
That's standard terminology in other countries. I don't think that it makes any sense at all when applied to countries which don't go by the Parliamentary system.
If I'm not mistaken it has to do with the process after the elections of forming a government, whereas in the US the elections do that for us, and the President only gets to select nominees for various agencies.
The bigger problem is that there's a large and vocal group that seems to think that the abuses of power are a good idea and that any effort by the government to better our lives is an abuse of power comparable to anything the Nazis ever did.
Linking is the equivalent to pointing and shouting "Oh look, a deer!" in the real world.
Doesn't matter, it's still not copying. Doesn't matter what it looks like. It really doesn't matter if you do something like throw it in a frame, or load it directly from another site, there's still no new publishing going on. Knock off the original and the "copy" ceases to exist.
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You'd have to be an incredibly slow typist before that became an issue. Personally, I rarely if ever bother to go particularly fast when it comes to typing because I don't need to. Right now I'm typing at a pretty relaxed pace so that I can read and correct as I go. It is nice that I don't have to think a lot about it, but if I did then I wouldn't have to go so slow. Reason being that I'd be paying more attention to what key I actually pressed rather than reading along to make sure that I pressed the correct keys at the correct times.
Or in other words, reducing cognitive load only works if you actually reduce the load. Shifting it from locating a key to checking that you typed what you meant to is at best a zero sum transaction.
30 WPM is easily doable without knowing how to touch type. Back before I bothered to learn to touch type, I could easily do that with the old hunt and peck.
And really, if you can't do at least 50 WPM, you really shouldn't be bragging about your typing speed, at least not anywhere that anybody that uses a keyboard on a regular basis might see you doing so.
That's what I was thinking about. Most of what you want in a programmer isn't measured by WPM. You could type a hundred WPM and still be completely useless if what you're typing is junk. Admittedly, I don't do a lot of programming, but much of my time spent programming is designing and contemplating how to solve the problem correctly.
Correctly as in securely, efficiently and in a way which I can read later on. Fast typing is from my point of view somewhat counter productive as short burst of flurry don't really make that much difference when you're trying to write quality code.
But then again, I used to be able to hunt and peck at 30+ WPM when I don't need to touch type.
Indeed, you can keep selling a product without support or patches for future OS releases, but in practice few people are willing to pay for that.
Probably the best case scenario would be how Blender was handled. It's not generally that useful to sell old software that's not being updated or bug fixed.
To be fair, Canadians have it easier, just put eh after every letter.
Except it won't. The only reason why they use chip and pin over there is that regulators actually regulate. In the US we haven't been using chip and pin because the bankers figured out that it's cheaper to just pay off any claims due to fraud than to pay the $50 or so it costs per card to use chip and pin.
It's probably not as big an issue in the UK and Europe in general given that they seem to be at least halfway serious about holding financial institutions responsible when they lose customer data. Around here the best you can hope for is a minor slap on the wrist.
I'm not particularly familiar with how he was planning to go about this, but it's a pretty good bet that a lot of the trouble came from subsidies. For reasons that don't make any sense to anybody outside the oil industry, oil gets heavily subsidized while renewable energy gets only a very small fraction of the government support.
It depends where you are, here in WA state, we have a high gas tax which helps to level things a bit, but given the amount of experience that we have with oil and related technologies, it's hard to get the scale necessary to compete with oil.
Alternative energy would probably be coming along a lot more quickly, if oil wasn't subsidized and oil companies were required to pay the full cost of the externalities that their product creates.
It's fairly typical for them to get less than 35 cents per copy, assuming that they're a big star, and more likely they'll get less than a quarter a copy, after the recording studio makes them double pay for production costs and hides the profits. Not to mention making the artists pay for breakage and other costs that should be the studios to pay.
I wouldn't be griping about the cost of albums so much if there was a meaningful amount of the overage going to pay the talent. But a significant amount of the money is going to marketing, fixing the incompetent vocals and over compressing the music.
Citation needed. Turning a government provided service into a government mandated one isn't something I've ever seen called deregulation.
Why? There is at least a couple alternatives, the local municipality or you could own it. And whomever the service provider is could be required to maintain it as a part of the service agreement. I suppose it could even be a third party that you contract to maintain that bit of infrastructure.
Just because we've made a system where the utility owns the last mile, does not mean that there aren't other ways of doing it. Some which may work better and others which work worse, but which have a different set of tradeoffs to consider.
A genuine free markets can't exist for very long. That was established a really long time ago that a free market ends in a single source provider over every thing, assuming that there isn't a revolution and that the government doesn't step in to stop it from happening.
Show me a free market in which that isn't the case and I'll show you a free market that isn't anywhere near mature.
Not true. Deregulation as the term is defined, means that the government gets out of the way and lets what will happen happen. Customers do not regulate a market, never have and never will, they just don't buy and refuse to buy in lock step.
On top of that if none of the providers are willing to offer what the customers want, it won't happen. In a regulated economy, what tends to happen is the government steps in and provides it at tax payer expense.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong. What you're describing is a well regulated market. Definitely not a free market. Adam Smith was quite clear that a free market will lead to the sorts of behaviors that the GP was complaining about unless somebody steps in and puts in place regulations which prevent it.
Greenpeace is not a business and to be a member of Greenpeace one must donate to the cause.
True, but you get to choose how much you donate and for practical purposes if you're not willing to put even a couple bucks in the hat, you're probably not interested in being a member in the first place.
Perhaps they shouldn't be making big budget games without making them worth the cost. I know that's a bit simplistic, but if you make a game that you have to sell for $60 a copy in order to break even, then you damn well better make sure that it's bug free or at least free of significant bugs. It's more than a little bit insulting to be charged that much and end up with massive bugs and gameplay which is at best half baked.
Spend the money on gameplay and making the game fun, then the graphics necessary to make it work. Blowing many millions of dollars on graphics and marketing without worrying about gameplay issues is a great way to ensure that you're not going to be making any money. Back when most Nintendo game news seemed to come out of Nintendo power, I'm sure that worked fine, but now that you can get reviews of a game within hours of release, that kind of astroturfing doesn't work very well.
$10 for a CD is overpaying by quite a bit. They fought tooth and nail to keep the price artificially inflated at $18 per disc for so long, eventually Steve Jobs and piracy was able to convince them to lower the price, but even at $10 a disc, you're still over paying. A lot of the extra money goes to the process of creating popularity and over processing performers that ought not be allowed anywhere near a microphone.
Movies tend to be different as it's hard to know what they ought to cost.
however for software, the model is radically different. once you're into "self-funding", the next version, once completed, is almost pure profit thanks to the internet. there's no "physical goods" to produce. if it's data, it can be hosted, and it can be distributed for virtually nothing.
That's not true. Unless your second product is something that sells indefinitely and results in you no longer having to develop new versions, that money ends up going to developing future versions and new product lines.
Buying politicians and suing people that don't buy your product seems to be a pretty sustainable model at this point.
Bad argument.
That's just a variant of the slippery slope fallacy. At some point the price of a game will reach a point where it's considered to be a good deal. And that point is for most people way below $60. Sure if you're young or have few responsibilities paying that much and getting a really long game might be worthwhile, but for most people that's a lot of money to pay for a game that you're likely only going to play for at most a few dozen hours.
Hollywood can sort of get away with that because it does cost a lot of money to make a quality film in most cases, and trying to cut corners does hurt the experience. But with games it's different a game which costs $1m to make doesn't necessarily end up being more fun than a game which only cost $10k to make.
I suspect that the price will hit a stable equilibrium somewhat over $10 a copy, or at least that's my suspicion. It's cheap enough that most people pay more than that for a decent meal at a restaurant, but with more actual time to enjoy it. It wouldn't be much of a shock to me if the equilibrium point ended up sticking around $20 or so.
I always wonder about that, considering that Canadians pay for the use, shouldn't they be allowed to put whatever copyright materials they like on it? I mean they have paid for it, at least from the major studios.
Dumb ass. You do realize that there's a lead time of a couple years before the results of policy changes take effect, right? There are exceptions from time to time, but as a general rule, the decisions made right after inauguration tend not to have much impact until about the time of midterm elections.
If you did your homework, you'd realize that President Bush got a full year before anybody criticized him and nearly 5 before the press started to do so.
Precisely why should they? In the US our politicians have been more than willing in the past to bend over backwards to ensure that they don't have to get a business plan in place which might work. And companies don't really go out of business any more, they end up being bought out by the competition and the morons that led to ruin end up getting golden parachutes as the workers get pink slips.
That's standard terminology in other countries. I don't think that it makes any sense at all when applied to countries which don't go by the Parliamentary system.
If I'm not mistaken it has to do with the process after the elections of forming a government, whereas in the US the elections do that for us, and the President only gets to select nominees for various agencies.
The bigger problem is that there's a large and vocal group that seems to think that the abuses of power are a good idea and that any effort by the government to better our lives is an abuse of power comparable to anything the Nazis ever did.
Linking is the equivalent to pointing and shouting "Oh look, a deer!" in the real world.
Doesn't matter, it's still not copying. Doesn't matter what it looks like. It really doesn't matter if you do something like throw it in a frame, or load it directly from another site, there's still no new publishing going on. Knock off the original and the "copy" ceases to exist.